Autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles can improve road safety. For autonomous and semi-autonomous driving, human driver decisions will need to be translated to autonomous driving rules. As autonomous driving becomes more widespread, autonomous vehicles will still share the road with conventional vehicles driven by humans. Many roadway scenarios have rules and regulations and conventions. Human drivers rely on the rules and regulations and the conventions to successfully navigate roadway scenarios. Some conventions also include concepts such as courtesy (i.e., allowing another driver to merge ahead, allowing someone who does not technically have the right of way to go first, etc.) that do not technically follow roadway rules. Even so, human drivers expect other vehicles to follow conventions.
One common driving scenario that needs to be handled for autonomous driving is intersections that do not have traffic lights. Intersections have numerous rules and human drivers tend to not strictly follow the rules. Some drivers will be polite and wave another through the intersection, or flash high beams to indicate to another driver to go first. For human drivers, to safely navigate an intersection one approach is to make eye contact with the other driver and watch for any gestures. Since autonomous vehicles will share the road with human drivers, an autonomous vehicle will need to follow rules and regulations as well as understand conventions when navigating intersections.
It would be desirable to implement handling intersection navigation without traffic lights using computer vision.